Switzerland and its Limits

Roundtable: Switzerland and its Limits

Musée d'ethnographie de Genève
Saturday 29 October 2022, 5 – 6:30pm

With Denise Bertschi, Floriane Morin, and Bernhard Carlos Schär, conceived and moderated by Samia Henni

The roundtable explores the presentation and representation of Swiss involvements in colonial pasts and postcolonial presents disclosed in public spaces, museums, academic spheres, and imaginaries. Through the professional practice of four interlocutors operating in different fields and addressing various publics, the panel discusses the roles that institutions and individuals might or must play in undoing those presentations and representations. The term “limits” is meant not only as boundaries and restrictions, but also as breaking points that enable a multiplicity of possibilities and relations and futures.

Walk: Figures of International Geneva

Saturday, 29 October 2022, 2 – 3:30 pm
Guided tour by Aline Mona Zuber
Registration via this link (limited capacity)

What was the role of the major international organizations active in the promotion of human rights or humanitarianism in the "factory of inequalities"? By introducing three key figures of international Geneva – Henri Dunant, Gustave Moynier and William Rappard – the walkers will be invited to question this history and its current heritage. The objective of this guided tour lies in a desire to draw the public's attention to the history of the construction of inequalities in the 19th and 20th centuries by proposing to "meet" certain personalities of the local historical landscape celebrated in the space public, who participated directly or indirectly in these constructions. In doing so, the visit offers a better understanding of the history of humanitarian and international organizations from which inequalities and discrimination are not absent. This return to the past in turn sheds light on the “present of inequalities.”

Aline Mona Zuber is an historian with a degree in international history from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID). NEXPO will be presented by Samia Henni, historian of built and destroyed environments and professor at Cornell University.

Biography of panelists:

Denise Bertschi is a doctorante EPFL / HEAD–Genève. She completed her MA in Visual Arts at HEAD-Genève and her BA at ZHdK Zurich. Her work has been shown in diverse art institutions in Switzerland and elsewhere: in the Aargauer Kunsthaus, the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, LACA in Los Angeles, the Museum für Kunst und Gestaltung MKG in Hamburg, RosaBrux in Brussels, Artsonje in Seoul, WITS University in Johannesburg and Corner College in Zurich.

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments who teaches at Cornell University. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, EN; 2019, FR), the editor of War Zones (2018) and Deserts Are Not Empty (2022), and the maker of exhibitions, such as Housing Pharmacology (2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017–21). She is the co-chair of Beyond France, The University Seminar at Columbia University. She was Albert Hirschman Chair (2021–22) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Marseille, a guest Professor at the University of Zurich’s Institute of History of Art (Fall 2021), and a Geddes Fellow (Spring 2021) at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Floriane Morin is an art historian who graduated from the Ecole du Louvre in Museology and Pacific Arts and holds an M. A. in African Art History from the University of Paris IV. Between 2004 and 2009, she was curator of the African and Oceanian collections at the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva and produced several international exhibitions and publications under her co-direction. Since 2010, she has been Curator in charge of the African collections at the Ethnography Museum of Geneva. Within the frame of the MEG’s decolonial Strategic Plan 2019-2024, she is currently leading a global project on provenance research and critical history of the collections.

Bernhard Carlos Schär is an SNSF Eccellenza professor at the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Lausanne. He is currently leading a research group that examines Switzerland’s imperial and quasi-imperial relations with Brazil, Southern Africa and India through the lens of 19^th century missionaries and merchants. Bernhard studied at the Universities of Berne and Geneva, was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and has held fellowships in Singapore, Berlin, Munich, and Leiden. His most recent publication is: Switzerland, Borneo and the Dutch Indies. Towards a New Imperial History of Europe, in Past&Present, 2022.